posts brought to you by the category “copyright”

Das eez kaput! Sometime around 2002 I spaced the entire database
table that mapped individual entries to categories. Such is life.
What follows is a random sampling of entries that were associated
with the category. Over time, the entries will be updated and then it
will be even more confusing. Wander around, though, it's still a fun
way to find stuff.

Meanwhile, the street continues to find its own use for
things.

The thing that makes The Habeas Warrant Mark so unique is that it
is written as haiku, an ancient Japanese poetic form. Since our
headers are actual works of art, Habeas can use the powerful legal
tools available for copyright and trademark protection to prosecute
violators. In fact, Habeas has already shut down some spammers in
successful court actions.

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Nathan Yergler : mozCC

mozCC is an extension for Mozilla Firebird which scans pages for
RDF, specifically embedded Creative Commons licenses. When a license
is detected, mozCC does two things. First, it scans for license
information pertaining to the current web page and places relevant
icons on the status bar. Second, it enables a button on the toolbar
which allows you to explore the parsed licensing metadata.

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First Monday : Digitizing Old Photographs for the Web

Some are private photographs, images of family life. Others are
public photographs. Of course, as Roland Barthes (1981) observed in
Camera Lucida, even with public photographs we tend to provide a
private reading: "Does that train still run through our town?" "How
old was I when that happened?" We link images to our own
existence.

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Mozigo

MoziGo is the result of hacking the MOOzilla telnet code so that
it could be used as an Internet Go Server client. It's still in the
alpha stages and as of yet doesn't do much, but it's getting there.
Hopefully I'll have a working version in a few months (if not
more).

I wonder if I could use this as a base to
set up the networked Scrabble game I keep dreaming of.

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Michael Kinsey : Deliver Us From Evil

If the subjective basis for terrorists hating America is off
limits for consideration, that would seem to leave the objective
basis: Is it something we did, or didn't do, to them or theirs? But
this violates the ancient conservative taboo (c. 1984, styling by
Jeane Kirkpatrick) against "blaming America first." So, check and
mate: Terrorism is evil, evil, evil—gosh, it's evil—and
there's nothing else to discuss.

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From the "No, I'm still not going to give in and install Movable
Type" department :

Absolutely no progress has been made on
re-tooling the software that runs this weblog. I finished the first
release of
Image::Shoehorn::Gallery
and promptly discovered that although the package does exactly what I
imagined I wanted it to do, it didn't really do what I actually wanted
it to do. I still need to do a bit more debugging, but I think I
managed to teach the package a few new tricks : the ability to specify
disparate source and destination directories, the ability to specify a
scaled default image instead of the original and the ability to scale
an image only if the height or width of the original exceed user
defined limits. Assuming that it actually all works and that writing
the docs doesn't take too long, I should be able to upload 0.2 to the
CPAN in the next day or two. And then, in a fit of madness over lunch
last week, I promised
Karl
that 0.3 would support magic for reading user defined templates which
means spending even more time with the nightmare that is XPath.

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Daniel Gardner : Apache::Blog.pm

"is a simple handler for online diaries. At the
moment it works on the one-entry-one-page paradigm, but would be easy to
apapt to multiple entries per page if this is prefered. In the future
this will be a configuration option."

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Adobe : Photoshop 7.0 Scripting plug-in

Well, that's pretty huge news (although I
haven't read the docs yet, so we'll see...) dampened only by the fact
that your choice or languages are JavaScript, Visual Basic and
AppleScript
. But , presumably you can also get at [it] via AppleEvents which means
a
Perl
wrapper
ought to be possible. mmmmm, Apache::SOAP::Photoshop....

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Alex Ulmanu : What about SMS journalism?

"What better use can one get for the old inverted
pyramid? Since journalism students learn that when writing news stories
they have to give as much information as possible in as few words as
possible, SMS seems to be the ultimate expression of journalistic
concision."

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Les Orchard : MailToRSS

"I receive fewer items of email than news items I
manage to skim in a day, yet I never seem to get around to skimming or
reading all of the email. So, it might be useful to treat mail as news
items, turn my mail folders into personally syndicated weblogs. MailToRSS
will merge my incoming email stream with my news stream. Produce RSS from
mailbox indexes, provide links to read mail items, provide forms with
which to reply to email ala weblog comments."

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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : apogee

Apogee \Ap"o*gee\, n. [Gr. ? from the earth; ? from + ?, ?,
earth: cf. F. apog['e]e.] 1. (Astron.) That point in the orbit of the
moon which is at the greatest distance from the earth. Note: Formerly,
on the hypothesis that the earth is in the center of the system, this
name was given to that point in the orbit of the sun, or of a planet,
which was supposed to be at the greatest distance from the earth. 2.
Fig.: The farthest or highest point; culmination.
web1913

apogee n 1: a final climactic stage; "their achievements
stand as a culmination of centuries of development" [syn:
{culmination}] 2: apoapsis in Earth orbit; the point in its orbit where
a satellite is at the greatest distance from the Earth [ant: {perigee}]
wn

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"(wasabii) is an attempt to create a flexible,
yet simple, API, running via XML-RPC, for various web applications
running on heterogeneous platforms to communicate and interact. this
effort is meant to replace the bloggerAPI by providing a non
application-specific set of methods and arguements. in other words,
wasabii is not specifically geared for "weblogs," though it may fit that
model well. ideally, the API will be flexible enough to support other
types of web applications and content managements systems. realistically,
it will not be as simple as the bloggerAPI, but it will provide broader
functionality."

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I don't really know if I think the iLamp will be a hit

but the first questions I have are : 1)
Does it have a fan or is it quiet like the other iMacs? 2) How sturdy
is that arm and how long before it starts to sag? 3) Why can't they
make the modem jack double as a second ethernet jack? Why why why? On
the other hand it really is tiny, isn't it? And by the looks of it, you
could put it on a shelf and
all but hide the base
with the monitor. I bet that will score points with a lot of
people.

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John Dean : Military Tribunals, A Long and Mostly Honorable
Tradition

I mean, frankly, the title pretty much sums
it up. But, let's look at the reasons why the military tribunals, as
proposed by Dubya, are apparently okay. #1) They're expedient. I kid
you not:

The potential of having to mete out justice to possibly
thousands of alien enemy terrorists, or unlawful combatants, who are
openly violating the common law of war makes the use of these military
proceedings very appealing.

The good news, of course, is that by this logic we'll have a proven and
ready means of clearing of the backlog of cases that already exist in
the citizen's court system. #2) That guy, in the Civil War, who opposed
military tribunals, well he was just wrong:

...Lee's view, however, was quickly challenged and
overruled. Indeed, Lee was legislated out of a job by Congress, and
President Lincoln...

Indeed. #3) Bad council:

Rehnquist seems to suggest that if the government had had
better counsel it would have prevailed in Milligan.

Because, you know, the customer is always right. I am eagerly awaiting
the flood of court decisions that will overturned with this argument.
I am told that, in some cases, this is actually a valid argument.
In this instance, however, it strikes me as a bit of a strech.
#4) Nuremberg:

There were hundreds of these proceedings. Many of them -
like those at Nuremberg, to mention the obvious - remain models of
fairness and justice.

It is interesting that we don't hear mention of this one made more
often. It is, perhaps, the closest thing to a compelling argument made
to date. But not really. There were still those, at the end of World
War Two who had lived through the justice meted out on Germany after
the First World War and had seen what the economics and political
conditions it engendered had given rise to, namely Hitler. There was a
real incentive to prove, pretty much to all the parties involved I
think, that the war had been fought and won on principles and that
those principles extended both to the victor and the vanquished. And
the U.S. was gunning up for the Cold War so it needed to make friends
with the Axis, some quick. #5) Franky got cake; why can't I? :

Both Lincoln and FDR had the blessings of
Congress.

This is supposed to be a compelling argument? Congress has also blessed
a whole littany of ill-conceived and ridiculous laws in it's long and
storied past. Just because Congress says something doesn't mean it's
right; that is why laws are sometimes deemed to be unconstitutional.
#6) Someone else agrees with me :

For example, as one federal court noted in the 1972 case of
Atlee v. Laird...

That's great. People say stuff all the time. What was the outcome of
this case? Was it overturned? Was the comment even directly related to
the case? Anyway, I can name a few people that agree with me too.
What's next, the tyranny of the majority?

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Me : Apache::XBEL 1.2

This version adds support for Simon
Kittle's
Text::Outline
package which allows to you use a variety of outline(r) formats as
source. The source files are converted using the Text::Outline::asXBEL
method, and cached, before being handed off to the
foofy-izer
. see also
CHANGES

John McCrae : In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

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Although I am usually loathe to say anything about television

in this space, I feel it is important to
point out to Americans that, despite what their
televisions
may tell them,
Ontario
does
not
border Vermont
. If it makes you (Americans) feel any better, I went to visit my high
school History teacher, a couple years ago, and he told me his then
students were saying that Mexico was directly south of Canada...

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Stephen King : "It wouldn’t hurt to remember that the boys
who shot up Columbine High School

planned to finish their day by hijacking a
jetliner and flying it into — yes, that’s right — the
World Trade Center. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris weren’t exactly
rocket scientists, and the guys who did this didn’t have to be
either. All you had to be was willing to die..."

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maki: serving XML via Apache and Python

"maki is an attempt to glue together a simple,
flexible framework that allows you to use these technologies together to
serve web pages. It is a mod_python handler for Apache that is intended
to handle requests made to your server for XML files. When maki receives
such a request, it determines the path to the file, then searches through
its configuration to find the first rule that matches that path. Each
rule specifies one or more steps that are then to be executed."
Pretty cool, but the only problem is that if
you want to run Zope behind Apache, [Zope] requires, and mod_python can't
deal with, a threaded Python. I suppose, since Zope still uses Python
1.5.2 you could build mod_python against a threadless installation of
Python 2.0. No more complicated than any other Apache install, I
guess...

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Benoit Marchal : Managing e-zines with JavaMail and XSLT

"demonstrates how to automate e-mail publishing
chores with Java and XML. This concrete application of XML and XSLT
describes an e-mail newsletter (e-zine) publishing application that
outputs both HTML and plain text e-mail messages. Six reusable code
samples include a sample newsletter marked up in DocBook, an XSL style
sheet to convert the DocBook sample to a custom text output, a Java text
formatter (in the form of a SAX ContentHandler), two SAX filters, and the
Java code that puts it all together in a multistepped transformation."

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Rocco Lucia : Darwin ports

"As every FreeBSD enthusiast I wanted to see the
Ports Collection working on Darwin as soon as I installed Mac OS X on my
Powerbook. Here there is a quick and dirty way that will give a start to
the magic."

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Stephen E. Sachs : charties.cron

"is a cron script in the gawk language to
frequent the various charity sites affiliated with thehungersite.com.
These sites enable Web users to donate food, health care, and other goods
simply by clicking on a link. The sites generally count one click per IP
address per day; by making this a daily cron job, you can cause thousands
of dollars to be donated to charity each year."

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in the market for products that offer teenagers
adult style, individuality, sociability, rebellion, peer group bonding,
and adult aspiration. ... To explain the link with declining teenage
smoking, mobile phones are particularly important as they consume
teenagers' available cash, especially the pay-as-you-go cards. If some
teenagers cannot afford to smoke and pay for a mobile phone satisfies the
same needs as smoking, they may decide not to smoke."

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suricate

"brings the meerkat open wire service into the
realm of handheld devices, wireless email appliances, and interactive
pagers. I wrote suricate to address the needs of people that have email
provided on their hand held devices but no web access. suricate will push
the wire service content to the user."

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Many of todays links

have gone on my "
reading pile
". I think that if we were all forced to keep one of these and be
brutally honest about what we'd actually read versus what we thought
sounded neat, we might get a better handle on the depth, or penetration,
of any given meme.

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John Dizard : You came, you sang, you conquered

"Think of a hospital -- washed with
disinfectants, its residents shot full of antibiotics. Most pathogens
die, but the ones that live are supergerms, capable of breeding in pure
Clorox and lunching on ampicillin. The Canadian cultural scene is not
dissimilar. Any living forms are drenched with the disinfectant of
government grants and bombarded with radiation from CBC talk shows. For
original thinking to survive that selection process, it must be hardy
indeed. In the States, by way of contrast, creative types are treated
like free-range chickens, roaming where they please -- all the while
carefully kept away from exposure to poisonous civil-service positions
and protected from film-industry tax deals. The result: a class of
pencil-necked culturati, unable to compete with red-blooded invaders from
the North. Even Hollywood starlets are threatened. Think of poor Denise
Richards in Wild Things; mere alligator food to the likes of Neve
Campbell."

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Kenneth Tibbetts : Writing Friendly Code

"Call it my Millennium Resolution, I'm gonna quit
writing crappy code. I don't like writing it, I don't like seeing it on
the Web, and most of all I don't like going back and tinkering,
endlessly, with code that was too darn specific to start with." Truer
last words were never spoken more famously.

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Yusuf Islam

"As I look back at those songs they are an open
book. It was a time of learning and growing. When I first embraced Islam
I rejected everything. I wanted to make a clean break with the past. But
on reflection there are many things in those songs that remain true
today. My music still stands as something gentle and meaningful and
significant."

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sendmail.net : Q&amp;A with Paul Vixie

"...it's safe to say that the original design of
virtually all Internet technology took no account of human nature -
because the subset of humanity who used the early Internet had been
preselected by their employers and schools and research labs and whatnot
to weed out rudeness." Meanwhile,
via slashdot
come news that Hotmail (of all people)
will implement the MAPS Realtime Blackhole List
.

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perl.com has redesigned their website

It's very blue and the type is very small (in
that Mac-ish sort of way) but it does seem to make more sense than it
used to. They also have a cool &lt;a href =
"http://www.perl.com/pub/universal/pcb/solution.html"&gt;Recipe of
the Day&lt;/a&gt; feature. mmmmm....perl.

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David Bornstein : Reshaping Society Through People Power

"What is different today, however, is not only
the increasing number of these groups worldwide, but also the view that
they are a distinct sector, one that, like government, serves essential
social functions, but that has many of the entrepreneurial qualities of
business. The profit, in this case, is primarily social progress." This
is intriguing but I think it's important to remember that you can't, and
shouldn't, abstract people into concepts like a bottom-line. It would
make everyone's life *infinitely* easier it we could. Seriously. As long
as you were on the right side of the line.

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wtf?

dude, where's my car

This document uses
CSS
kung-fu and a small amount of JavaScript for rendering its
contents. Efforts have been made to separate the form from the
content so if you are viewing this in a text-based browser it
shouldn't be an issue.

On the other hand it may look funny if you are viewing it in a
browser with incomplete
CSS
and/or JavaScript implementations. Internet Explorer 6 comes to
mind.

It's not that I don't love you. However, my time is limited and
I no longer feel very good about spending it working around any one
browser's inconsistencies with little, or no, confidence that they
will ever be fixed or otherwise made more inconsistent at some
later date.

On the other hand, if something is down-right
unreadable
please let me know and I will endeavour to fix it.

yes, we have no bananas

This page may not validate. It's not that I don't care, it's
just that I'm not aware of it yet. Part of the reason that I
rewrote the entire back-end for managing this site is that the old
stuff made it too easy for these kinds of mistakes to slip through
the cracks.